Remember, remember the first of Movember; How facial fuzz became a mildly transgressive fashion statement

Shia LaBeouf

Photograph by: Frazer Harrison
, Getty Images

Never has being manly required so many beauty products.

Browse the men’s section at any drugstore and you’ll be bombarded with renewal serums, power bronzers and moisturizers designed for “richer and denser” skin. And if recent trends are any indication, it’s only going to get worse.

In Canada, the men’s grooming industry grew 3% in 2011, reaching $691-million, according to market research firm Euromonitor. In the U.S., it increased 11%, generating US$964-million in department store sales, according to another study by NPD.

To sellers, it remains a market with a untapped potential. To filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, it’s a problem, and it’s contributing to what he calls the “feminization of men,” something he explores in his documentary Mansome.

“When guys are looking in the mirror and saying, ‘I’m not good enough, I’m not handsome enough, I need to fix this in order to be that perfect image,’ for me that points to a bigger problem,” Spurlock says. His film asks what it means to be a man in a world of clean-shaven chests and products like guyliner and mantyhose (which are exactly what their punny names suggest).

“The commoditization of men is really helping to push this agenda of looking a certain way,” he says. “Business starts to drive that type of thought process, and when you pour millions of dollars into it, it starts to reshape the psyche.”

It’s not that the moustached filmmaker thinks men should show disregard for their appearance; he just thinks being handsome and hirsute shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

“If you go back to what men used to look like in popular culture — Tom Selleck, covered in hair, Robert Redford with his shirt buttoned down and a hairy chest, Burt Reynolds — there’s been this feminization of men that has started to happen,” Spurlock says. “Now you have to be this slick, quaff picture of perfection, and it takes away this gruff manliness that men used to have.”

But some men are fighting back against manufactured masculinity, and they’re choosing the follicles on their face to do so. Call it a soup strainer, a crumb catcher or a complete turnoff, but there’s no denying the moustache, or mo, is having a moment, at least according to Allan Peterkin, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and author of the recently released One Thousand Mustaches: A Cultural History of the Mo.

“After decades of being much maligned in Western culture, the moustache is now enjoying a cultural renaissance,” Peterkin says, pointing to young celebrities such as James Franco and Ryan Gosling helping to usher it in, as well as charitable movements such as Movember, which raised $125.7-million for prostate cancer research in 2011, with Canadians being the largest contributors worldwide.

Peterkin says while the moustache has always been a sign of virility in many non-Western countries, in the West, it really only enjoyed prominence in the 1970s — until now.

“In the 20th century, you had these pockets of facial hair,” he says, pointing to the ’50s beatniks and their soul patches, the bearded hippies of the ’60s, followed by the mustachioed ’70s, then the Miami Vice designer stubble of the ’80s, and the ’90s grunge look, which morphed into the goatee.

“Since the mid-’90s, everything else has been done again in different manifestations, but the one thing that was missing was the moustache,” he says, adding that the main reason is the connotations that were stuck to it like this morning’s breakfast.

“It took on this sexualized connotation in the ’70s,” he says. “Porn culture was a little more prevalent, so you had the porn ’stache, then it got associated with swinger types, and then there was the gay clone moustache, which came out of the Castro district in San Francisco. Since then, the average guy just wasn’t ready for his face to be read in a sexual way.”

Peterkin cites two reasons for the mo’s recent return: first, that facial hair is cyclical, and with every other variation revisited since the ’90s, including the full beard, the moustache was “the final frontier;” and second, “the more we see it in a fun and ironic way, the less we’re thinking about those hyper-sexualized ’70s.”

Shaving companies, who profit directly from men having clean-shaven faces, are even trying to find ways to benefit from the trend (the sale of razors and blades declined by close to 1% last year in Canada, according to Euromonitor), which would explain why you’ll notice an increase in things such as facial hair grooming kits, beard shampoo and moustache wax at drugstores, of which Gillette’s fuzz-friendly campaign with Adrian Brody, Gael Garcìa Bernal and Andre 3000 is the most public part. The Kent Brush company even reissued its moustache comb, including a selection of limited edition handmade ones for Movember.

“We’re seeing a big emphasis toward the beard and the moustache as the accessory of the season,” says Jeremy Freed, editor of Sharp for Men magazine, although he’s careful to note that, personally, he doesn’t think “this year is going to be the big year that the moustache makes its full comeback and is not assumed to be ironic. But it certainly gets closer every year.”

That said, advertisers, now in on the trend, have started to “encourage men to play around with their facial hair. Don’t marry to just one style — mix it up every month,” Freed says.

In other words, it’s fine if you want to grow facial hair, but you’re probably going to need a special three-in-one razor that lets your trim, shave and sculpt if you want to do it right.

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